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One-armed figure skater Kristy Allison-McDonald a force to be reckoned with

Kristy Allison-McDonald is delighted to be back competing in synchronized figure skating, the sport she loves.

Kristy Allison McDonald lost her arm 14 years ago after being run over by a boat, but has returned to the ice to compete in syncro figure skating. Story by Daniel Girard. Video by Rene Johnston.(Rene Johnston/Toronto Star)

At 30, Allison-McDonald has been without her left arm, from the shoulder down, since being run over by a boat half her lifetime ago. More than just an accident that threatened her life and altered its future course, it took away her greatest passion — competing in synchronized figure skating.

Until now. Allison-McDonald has returned to the ice to compete 14 years after it was clear she was no longer welcome in a sport that rewards sameness, celebrates symmetry and obsesses over the placement of arms. Both arms.

“When I get out there I forget that I’m different than everybody else,” Allison-McDonald said prior to weekly practice with her team, Iced Energy of the Newmarket Skating Club. “It makes me feel normal.”

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By its definition, synchronized skating is about uniformity. Teams of between eight and 20 are judged by how much they look alike — from their costumes, hair and make-up, to the intricate steps, turns and formations — while performing to music and with speed in two to four-and-half-minutes.

Skaters spend virtually all of their time during a performance firmly attached to each other with both arms.

“You should all look the same, to be blunt,” said Kathy Stevens, coach of Allison-McDonald’s current team and a teenaged volunteer at Innisfil Skating Club when she began skating at age 7.

At 15, Allison-McDonald made a junior competitive synchro skate team which was to represent Canada in Italy the following season.

But that summer, everything changed. On July 22, 1998, on what she recalls as “a typical, perfect cottage summer day,” she was tubing with two teammates and their moms on Three-Legged Lake near Parry Sound.

The rope holding the double tubes off the back of the boat got caught around the motor and stopped the propeller. One of the moms got up from the wheel and came back to untangle it without putting the engine in neutral. As the rope was loosened from the propeller, the boat lurched ahead, still in gear.

Circling, with no one steering, the boat came directly at the tube she was on.

“I saw it coming and I was conscious the whole time,” said Allison-McDonald, who suffered a severed artery and would have likely bled to death if one of the mothers, a nurse, didn’t stem it.

“I didn’t necessarily feel pain in my shoulder but I had a cut on my foot and that’s what hurt more.

“My feet were up in the air and I was looking at them and I asked ‘why aren’t you dealing with my foot?’” she recalled asking. “But they said ‘we have bigger issues to deal with.’ I looked over and saw it (her arm) and went, ‘oh, okay.’ ”

As their daughter was being flown from Parry Sound to Toronto, her parents got the phone call from Allison-McDonald’s grandparents: The OPP had just come to the house.

“All they said was your daughter has been in a serious boating accident and is being airlifted to Sick Kids,” her father Todd Allison said. “Get there as quickly as you can.”

Donna Allison recalls walking into the hospital unsure of what to expect.

“Her first words were ‘Mom, I ruined my new bathing suit.’ ”

A dozen surgeons were assembled to reattach the limb. The operation was scheduled for 12 to 16 hours but after just 30 minutes they got the verdict. A doctor told the family that the limb couldn’t be saved.

Unlike the more precise cut that would come from a straighter edge, the offset nature of the boat’s propeller tore through her arm indiscriminately, savaging bone, muscle and cartilage. It was amputated below the shoulder. And, because she has no arm stump, a prosthetic doesn’t actually function.

Despite five more surgeries to repair her shoulder, Allison-McDonald went home after two weeks rather than two months, as projected.

“We’re thinking okay, this is going to change her life, everything is going to have to be Velcro,” said Todd Allison, a fitness equipment salesman. “Then we walk in one day and she says ‘watch.’

“She never asked us to tie her shoes, or her skates.” She had learned how to do it by herself.

Back home and with the team trip to Italy looming, Allison-McDonald was anxious to get back on blades. She began on roller blades in the driveway, striding and doing spins just weeks after the accident.

“ ‘If I can do this mom, I can go back on the ice,’ ” Donna Allison, a retired teacher, recalled her daughter telling her.

If only it had worked out that way. Allison-McDonald travelled with the team to Italy but never skated. Despite practising with the club throughout the season, coaches wouldn’t put her into a competition. She soon left the squad.

“It wasn’t my choice. It wasn’t my family’s choice. It wasn’t a financial choice,” she said of her decision to stop synchronized skating less than a year after the accident. “Continuing just wasn’t a decision supported by the club.”

Donna Allison added: “Some people just couldn’t see beyond the disability.”

Allison-McDonald skated alone for the remainder of high school, completing the highest test levels in the dance category. First she became a volunteer singles coach, then a paid synchronized team coach. Life went on.

But obstacles remained. Allison-McDonald was wracked by phantom pain in her amputated limb. She regularly missed school.

Still, Allison-McDonald tried to grow more comfortable in her altered skin. She eschewed a prosthetic arm: Its use was entirely cosmetic due to the extent of her amputation. At her high school prom she wore a sleeveless dress, a message to all: “This is who I am. This is what I look like.”

She completed a bachelor of commerce, then real estate appraiser training. Through it all, skating remained a lifeline. She coached every year.

Melissa Levesque, whose daughter was taught by Allison-McDonald, admits “I didn’t even clue in” to the missing arm for about six months because she wore a winter coat with the sleeve tucked in her pocket. “I was certainly awe-inspired when I realized,” Levesque said. “I still am.”

Her daughter Janessa, then 11, said the coach was “strict when needed” and helped them move from last in first year to fourth at regionals the next.

“If we were having an off-day at practice, she didn’t have to say anything for us to be inspired,” Janessa Levesque said. “You’d say: ‘Look what she can do, why can’t we?’ It made us see things differently, try harder.”

Allison-McDonald returned to many of the things she’d done before — boating, water-skiing, golf and took up scuba diving. She married Brady McDonald, a longtime friend. She fundraised for the Starlight Children’s Foundation.

But a return to synchronized figure skating as a competitor remained elusive until this past fall. Kathy Stevens, who had skated synchro with Allison-McDonald in Barrie years earlier, needed women for her team and called.

Fourteen years after her last competitive performance, she returned, introducing herself to her new teammates by telling them about the accident.

“She was so calm and cool, it made me like her right away,” said Kelly Cunningham, 29, a teammate on Iced Energy, hosts of the central Ontario regional championships which began Friday at the Ray Twinney Complex in Newmarket. “She wasn’t self conscious or shy about it.

“It’s just who she was. The girl’s got balls. I’ll give her that.”

Teammates, who embraced her from the outset, made minor adaptations to their program, putting her in the strong skater’s position of the outside of their wheel formation, Cunningham holding her by the shoulder socket.

“It’s remarkable the balance she needs to skate with one arm, and also the stability in the maneuvers,” Stevens said. “Without a second arm, she has to trust the skater beside her will hold on tight and keep her in formation.”

For Allison-McDonald it’s just one more hurdle she’s cleared since her accident. And, it’s one she believes has made her whole.

“It’s the last challenge that I hadn’t overcome to be just like everyone else,” she said. “I can do zippers. I can put my hair in a ponytail.

“And now, I can skate just like everyone else can, again.”

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